The Success of Worker-owned Businesses

The co-op’s pilot business was the Evergreen Cooperative Laundry, which set up shop in October 2009 to service the Cleveland Clinic and University Hospitals. Today the laundry, which uses energy-efficient washers and dryers, is housed in a one-story LEED-certified building. Facing the street are three frescoes, each featuring the slogan people planet profits. That is the succinct philosophy of the Evergreen Cooperatives, and it suggests how their model upends the usual socialist–capitalist antipathy. The laundry employs fifty men and women, who clean twelve million pounds of linens a year and who will eventually own 100 percent of the company. Are they socialists who own the means of production, or capitalists who own their own company? The answer, I suppose, is that they represent a new economic model that eschews such false dichotomies. They have solid jobs and are accumulating wealth.

In Harper’s, Erik Reece has a really great piece looking at the success of worker-owned businesses, specifically, the Evergreen Cooperatives in Cleveland, which has created environmentally sustainable jobs in low-income neighborhoods. Workers in the Evergreen Cooperatives have an equal vote when it comes to company business and also share in the profits, which encourages them to work more as a team and push their company to success.

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